Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Longitudinal Z-boson polarization and the Higgs boson production cross-section

  Simone Amoroso

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 016 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Lepton pairs are produced copiously in high-energy hadron collisions via electroweak gauge boson exchange, and are one of the most precisely measured final states in proton- proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We propose that measurements of lepton angular distributions can be used to improve the accuracy of theoretical predic- tions for Higgs boson production cross sections at the LHC. To this end, we exploit the sensitivity of the lepton angular coefficient associated with the longitudinal Z-boson polarization to the parton density function (PDF) for gluons resolved from the incoming protons, in order to constrain the Higgs boson cross section from gluon fusion processes. By a detailed numerical analysis using the open-source platform xFitter, we find that high-statistics determinations of the longitudinally polarized angular coefficient at the LHC Run III and high-luminosity HL-LHC improve the PDF systematics of the Higgs boson cross section predictions by 50 % over a broad range of Higgs boson rapidities.

• Transverse Single Spin Asymmetries of Heavy Flavor Electrons and Charged Pions in 200 GeV $p+p^{\uparrow}$ Collisions at Midrapidity

  Dillon Fitzgerald

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 012 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Transverse single spin asymmetries of particles produced in $p+p^{\uparrow}$ collisions provide insight on the partonic spin and momentum structure of hadrons; heavy flavor electrons provide access to initial state spin-momentum correlations of gluons in the proton, while charged pions provide access to initial and final state transverse spin effects. Charged particles are measured at midrapidity at PHENIX using the silicon vertex detector and central arm spectrometer, made of an electromagnetic calorimeter, a ring-imaging Cherenkov detector, and drift and pad chambers. Recent results for both electron and charged pion measurements from the 2015 running period will be presented.

• Measurement of the $\textit{CP}$ structure of the Higgs-tau Yukawa coupling

  Vinaya Krishnan MB

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 008 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The CMS experiment at the LHC has performed the first measurement of the CP structure of the Yukawa coupling between the Higgs boson and tau leptons. The measurement is based on data collected in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV during 2016-18, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $137\text{ fb}^{-1}$. The analysis utilizes the angular correlation between the decay planes of tau leptons produced in Higgs boson decays, where dedicated analysis techniques are used to optimise the reconstruction of tau decay planes. The measured value of the CP mixing angle is $4\pm17^{\circ}$, at $68\%$ confidence level. The pure $\textit{CP-}$odd hypothesis is excluded by $3.2$ standard deviations. The analysis strategies and the results of the measurement are presented.

• Recent results from heavy ion collisions at LHCb

  Óscar Boente García

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 007 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  LHCb is a fully instrumented spectrometer covering the forward rapidity region at the LHC, which provides unique access to the small Bjorken-x region inside the nucleus. In this contribution, a selection of recent results from the LHCb heavy-ion program are presented, including a measurement of charged hadron production in proton-proton (pp) and proton-lead (pPb) collisions, chic2/chic1 production in pPb collisions, and coherent J/psi production in peripheral and ultra-peripheral PbPb collisions. Comparisons with calculations and effects from the nuclear PDFs and dense QCD medium are discussed.

• Recent Highlights on Higgs Physics from the LHC

  Elisabeth Schopf

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 001 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Many of the Higgs boson production and decay channels, predicted by the StandardModel, have been observed since its 2012 discovery. Today, measurements of the Higgsboson’s properties in these channels deepen our understanding of the nature of thisfundamental particle by providing better information about its mass, production kine-matics, and CP structure. Increasing precision also enables targeting rare Higgs bosondecay modes and probing di-Higgs-boson production. In addition, searches for beyondStandard Model physics in the Higgs sector are performed. This article presents the lat-est Higgs boson measurement highlights from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations usingLHC proton-proton collision data at a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV.

• Resummation for $tqH$ production

  Matthew Forslund, Nikolaos Kidonakis

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 021 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present results with soft-gluon resummation for the associated production of a single top quark and a Higgs boson. We present analytical results for the higher-order soft-gluon corrections and numerical results for the total cross section and top-quark transverse momentum and rapidity distributions at LHC energies.

• Transverse Single-Spin Asymmetries of Midrapidity Direct Photons and Neutral Mesons at PHENIX

  Nicole Lewis

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 009 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Results are presented for the transverse single-spin asymmetries of direct photons, neutral pions, and eta mesons for $|\eta|<0.35$ from $p^\uparrow + p$ collisions with $\sqrt{s} = 200$ GeV at PHENIX. As hadrons, $\pi^0$ and $\eta$ mesons are sensitive to both initial- and final-state effects and at midrapidity probe the dynamics of gluons along with a mix of quark flavors. Because direct photon production does not include hadronization, the direct photon TSSA is only sensitive to initial-state effects and at midrapidity provides a clean probe of the gluon dynamics in transversely polarized protons. All three of these results will help constrain the collinear twist-3 trigluon correlation function as well as the gluon Sivers function, improving our knowledge of spin-dependent gluon dynamics in QCD.

• Anomalous coupling studies with forward protons at the LHC

  C. Royon

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 115 (2022) · published 13 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We describe the gain on sensitivities to quartic $\gamma \gamma \gamma \gamma$, $\gamma \gamma WW$ and $\gamma \gamma \gamma Z$ anomalous couplings and to the search for Axion-Like Particles by two or three orders of magnitude with respect to standard methods at the LHC by tagging intact protons in the final state.

• Probing gluon density fluctuations at large momentum transfer $|t|$ at HERA

  Arjun Kumar

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 166 (2022) · published 14 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The information on the gluonic structure and its fluctuations is captured by the differential $|t|$ spectrum in diffractive events. The incoherent cross-section is sensitive to the fluctuations in the target wavefunction in such events. We investigate the incoherent $ep$ cross-section in $J/\psi$ photoproduction using the impact-parameter dependent dipole model. The spatial gluonic structure is modelled as hotspots of gluon density having substructure where this substructure is modelled as hotspots within hotspots. We find that three levels of the substructure provide a good description of all the data, available up to $|t|=30~$GeV$^2$. We investigate these fluctuations in both the saturated and non-saturated dipole models and compare our predictions with the HERA Data.

• Next generation proton PDFs with deuteron and nuclear uncertainties

  Rosalyn L. Pearson, Richard D. Ball, Emanuele R. Nocera

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 026 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  As data become more precise, estimating theoretical uncertainties in global PDF determinations is likely to become increasingly necessary to obtain correspondingly precise PDFs. Here we present a next generation of global proton PDFs (NNPDF4.0) that include theoretical uncertainties due to the use of heavy nuclear and deuteron data in the fit. We estimate these uncertainties by comparing the values of the nuclear observables computed with the nuclear PDFs against those computed with proton PDFs. For heavy nuclear PDFs we use the nuclear nNNPDF2.0 set, while for deuteron PDFs we develop an iterative procedure to determine proton and deuteron PDFs simultaneously, each including the uncertainties in the other. Accounting for nuclear uncertainties resolves some of the tensions in the global fit of the proton PDFs, especially those between the nuclear data and the extended LHC data set used in NNPDF4.0.